Though I've never tried it, I've always loved the idea of using Scheme as my Unix shell. Olin Shivers has a 1994 paper that describes it beautifully. Today I came across a 2001 article from Linux Magazine (of all places). It's not that exciting but does offer some good examples. I downloaded the Scheme Shell source but the configure / make magic didn't work for me under OS X. because of lots of incompatible implicit declarations. There is a Fink distribution but I'm not sure I want to go there. If anyone has successfully built the Scheme Schell under OS X, I'd like to hear about it.